Wynton Marsalis, America's Musical Ambassador

As we bring in the New Year, we thought we'd bring you some great music.

He is an American master - Wynton Marsalis - at age 49, arguably the best known living jazz artist and leader of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, probably the best big band at work today. They're on the road constantly, bringing America's most distinctive art form to the world, most recently to London, Berlin and Havana.

"60 Minutes" and correspondent Morley Safer were lucky enough to tag along - a joyous assignment, if there ever was one, trying to get a sense of this band of brothers, their music and their effect as unofficial ambassadors.

"It's interesting. When you guys take the stage, you're never front and center," Safer pointed out.

"No. I play fourth trumpet. That's my role. I like it. I'm comfortable playin' in the trumpet section. It started because I can't really conduct. I'm not a good conductor," Marsalis explained.

He tried, until a brave member of the band delivered the verdict. "Every time I would start conducting, if I would mess something up, he would look down at his music and go (thumb over shoulder). That meant 'Go get back in the trumpet section,'" Marsalis remembered.

And there Marsalis stays, storming his way through some of the most difficult, hair-raising music in the jazz repertoire.

"I like pressure. I like that. I like the challenge. I don't have a problem with it at all. I like the feeling of nervousness. I like the feeling that something counts. And I like to be tested," he told Safer.

Soloing certain tunes, a bass player said many years ago, is like trying to change the fan belt on your car with the engine running.

"Man, when you're playing, and you're playing with other people, it's such a combination of emotion, it's so intense. And when you make a tender statement or something's real sweet and you just caress a note that takes more intensity. It's powerful," Marsalis said.

It's hard to believe the boy wonder from New Orleans, who has been startling both jazz and classical audiences since his teens, is now pushing 50. He has won nine Grammys and a Pulitzer Prize for music.

And he has logged more miles around the world than your average secretary of state.

"You've spent 30 years since you were a teenager in the music business. That makes you, in a certain way, a very young elder statesman," Safer remarked.

"I don't feel like that. I mean, they will tease me, called me an old man since I was in my late 20s," Marsalis said.

It was his old man, Ellis, a pianist, a New Orleans legend, who passed the jazz gene on to Wynton and three of his five brothers.